It’s also a massive cultural system. And the stakeholders—the utilities, investment firms, power plant owners, mining firms, and “too-big-to-fail” multinational conglomerates—will not go gently into the future’s bright night. An abundance of carbon-free energy is a nice idea, but fossil fuel companies are still responsible for the vast majority (66.5 percent) of the power on our grid. Coal may be on the way out; the Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts that roughly a fifth of total coal capacity will be retired between 2012 and 2020, and even the chief executive of the American
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